A Gift For The Ages

December 04, 2007

It must be a museum curator's dream: A phone call from a family living in an obscure town in Oregon yields the gift of a painting by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh.

Bruce Guenther, curator for the Portland Art Museum, is living that dream. Mr. Guenther received a phone call asking if the museum might be interested in a painting. After some probing, Howard Sohn, whose parents owned the painting, disclosed that it was by Van Gogh.

Van Gogh painted "The Ox-Cart" while living in the Dutch village of Nuenen in the 1880s, a few years after he began working with oils. Markedly different from his best-known works - the subject, a scrawny ox pulling a cart, is rendered in brown, gray, black and green - the painting displays the textural use of oils that was to become Van Gogh's trademark.

For the art world, it's an electrifying discovery. The Sohn family's experience of this painting, however, was casual and intimate. Mr. Sohn's grandfather bought it in 1950. As a child, Howard Sohn saw it in the dining room of his grandparents' Connecticut home.

Eventually, the Sohn family agreed "The Ox-Cart" belonged to a wider audience and donated it to the museum.

The discovery is the stuff of PBS's "Antiques Roadshow." Only with one big difference: The Sohn family knew what they had. We wonder how many other families have similar treasures and are as capable of such remarkable generosity.